Research Roundup: A simple, rapid COVID-19 diagnostic, a potential remdesivir-like treatment, and nasal spray vaccines

Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign-up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email. Three new studies, recently published in the journal JAMA, support the use of steroids to treat severely ill COVID-19 patients, generating mounting evidence that these common drugs are the most effective treatment for the virus found to date. The use of steroids to treat COVID-19 had been under debate over the last few months, as some worried that they could prevent the body from fighting off the virus effectively as a side effect of tamping down the immune system’s potentially deadly overreaction to infection. Dexamethasone, a steroid that was found to reduce deaths among the most serious COVID-19 cases, has been in use in some areas since a major June UK study demonstrated its efficacy. The new research, published jointly by three different global teams, further backs the use of dexamethasone as well as another steroid, hydrocortisone. Positive results on steroid use are especially significant because of their wide availability and inexpensive prices, making them an accessible treatment option.Study results released last week, gathered from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland analyzing immune response to COVID-19, found evidence of a lasting antibody presence post-infection. Previous smaller studies have suggested COVID-19 antibodies might disappear quickly after infection, making the unknowns of lasting immunity and future infection a question of interest for researchers. The new study, conducted by Amgen-subsidiary deCODE Genetics, used nasal swabs and blood samples from 30,576 individuals to examine infection levels and immune response. Results showed that after the first wave of antibodies, which may fade after a month or two as other studies have reported, a longer-lasting second wave of antibodies forms, which was shown to remain stable for four months. While these findings are not necessarily applicable to all countries’ populations, and several unknowns remain, the results provide an optimistic sign for vaccine makers hoping to confer long-lasting COVID-19 immunity.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is backing nine additional COVID-19 test manufacturers as part of its Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative (RADx), adding US$129.3 million in funding to scale up production of point-of-care screening tests and high-throughput laboratory assays. Many of the test candidates are using innovations that have moved from labs to point of care in five to six months—a process that usually takes years—according to NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) Director Bruce Tromberg. NIBAB helps lead RADx, which hopes to deliver products and services to the public this fall.

Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign-up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email. COVID-19 vaccine trials in the United States, several of which are now in phase 3, have so far not included pregnant women or women who are breastfeeding, and only one potential US-market vaccine manufacturer—AstraZeneca—has begun testing in children. Vaccine candidates are customarily tested first in healthy adults, the population deemed most likely to provide clear results on vaccine efficacy and be at lowest risk for side effects, often leaving out younger populations and women who are pregnant. As manufacturers have been starting to broaden their volunteer pools to other typically underrepresented and at-risk populations—for example, adults over the age of 65 and people with HIV—some experts and advocates remain concerned about the lack of data regarding pregnant women and children.The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to SalivaDirect, a saliva-based COVID-19 diagnostic test developed by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and funded by the National Basketball Association (NBA). The test joins several other saliva-based tests that have been greenlit by FDA in recent months. SalivaDirect’s Yale-based research team is now working with other labs to develop more saliva-based diagnostics, including one developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which also received EUA last week. Researchers hope that increased availability of saliva-based tests—which often do not require administration by a trained health care worker and cost less than the standard nasopharyngeal swab tests—will improve speed and affordability of COVID-19 detection.Pharmaceutical companies and research centers, supported by the European Union (EU), have created a 37-member initiative working to advance research and development (R&D) to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Called the Corona Accelerated R&D in Europe (CARE) initiative, the research-focused consortium has three main goals: screen libraries to identify existing compounds that have potential to be repurposed against COVID-19, perform in silico screening to find new small molecules that fight SARS-CoV-2, and apply approaches like fully human phage and yeast display to the discovery of virus-neutralizing antibodies. The initiative is one of several organizational collaborations working on strategies against COVID-19 and will work to ensure its efforts integrate with and complement other programs, with plans to operate for the next five years.